Eventually, a similar CPU to that of a smartphone will be placed in laptops because of its power-efficiency. Once these CPUs can obtain better battery lives and better performance, they will be placed in laptops. It's slowly happening with Intel's fourth-generation chips; it's only a matter of time.

I have a full PC, a laptop, a tablet, and a smart phone and I use them all regularly. I use the laptop the most because a usually need portability with decent-sized screen, a mouse, and a keyboard.

I don't believe one type of device will dominate. What is best all depends. Typing on a cell phone or tablet is ridiculous. Adding a keyboard to the tablet helps, but then it is not much more portable than a laptop. Editing photos with a tablet or cell phone touch screen is very limited. Video editing is all but impossible. However, the portability of cell phone is unbeatable for things like looking up phone numbers and taking quick photos. I prefer my tablet for reading books. The high screen resolution, long battery life, and convenient size make it the best for an ebook library.

There is a lot of talk about Apple and Google working on a wristwatch device. Just as cell phones threatened to make watches extinct, maybe a watch device will find a niche in the digital ecology. It would save the enormous effort required to take a cell phone out of a pocket. Various gadget watches have made in the past. One loaded data optically by holding the watch up to a CRT that flashed a digital stream. Obviously watch gadgets haven't caught on.

There has been technology around for some time to build autostereoscopic displays -- the kind that looks 3D without having to wear headgear. The displays are generally expensive, but a small display for a watch might be provided for an acceptable price.

On the other end of computer gadgetry, I'm surprised that games have not made more use of multiple large screen displays. The big market for multiple display computers is for financial people like stock traders. They were the early adopters of flat screen technology. Apparently, they can't get too much data in view at once.

Google is experimenting with head-mounted data displays, and there is prototype floating around of a new wide field-of-view head mount for gamers, called the Oculus Rift http://www.oculusvr.com... They are selling kits to build the prototype display yourself. For games, the challenge is to get good cheap head tracking. That's more difficult than the optics.

Rather than one type of computer platform dominating, it will probably get worse, with more options.

It will take a long time for mobile "plug and play" devices to replace desktop computers. I currently have a laptop right now, and I hate it. If I don't leave it plugged in, it will run out of power in about an hour. Seriously. Also, the 5400 rpm hard drive and mobile cpu don't help at all with what I do (heavy video editing, etc.)

I don't understand how people think tablets *cough* Windows 8 *cough* can replace laptops even. The efficiency of a keyboard and mouse to work on things like Java programming and other IDEs cannot be replaced by a touch screen no matter how hard you try. I guess it's good for people who only use their tablet to check Twitter or whatever. But I really don't think phones will dominate over a traditional desktop with keyboard and mouse.

At 7/2/2013 6:26:51 PM, JuliaD wrote:The mobile market will dominate the PC market within several years.

That's the equivalent of saying that because there are more people eat food than people who ride trains, food is replacing trains.

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